'If/Then' takes an exciting leap between two lives

BROADWAY REVIEW: 'If/Then' at the Richard Rodgers Theatre

March 31, 2014|Chris Jones

NEW YORK — — “I don't want to be a new kind of married,” howls one of the self-doubting characters in Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey's occasionally precious but thoroughly fascinating and intellectually and musically rich new Broadway musical. With Idina Menzel at its center, “If/Then” is a zesty, restless, savvy, ambitious, twin-plotted original that's not an adaptation of anything but a very compelling and involving idea about a youngish divorcee in the self-actualizing, progressive playground that is today's Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Elizabeth has just arrived in New York — which, in Broadway-speak, means her life can finally begin. She is pushing 40, clock ticking but job offers are rolling in, and she finds herself surrounded by angst-ridden others, all dealing with the anguish of so many choices for the highly educated, deftly networked and amply resourced.

Beautifully and accessibly scored, “If/Then” tracks its central character, an urban planner by trade, through two different sets of life choices. One involves kids and a traditional guy. The other features a bigger career but less cultivated, and thus more complex, romantic entanglements with the indecisive and conflicted (the choice between saving the world and liking Whole Foods being another dichotomy that confounds the Coldplay generation and thus infuses this show).

Elizabeth's twin journeys — one as Liz, one as Beth, to help us keep track — unspool at once, scenes alternating cleverly before they finally connect, like the closed end of a once-forked road. The biggest fans of this show will be those who constantly second-guess their decisions in love, work and life. That would be those of us who constantly wonder what might have happened had we nixed that date as we almost did, taken that other job, skipped that phone call, not married her, not gone to the park that day and seen that cute guy, or whatever other life-changing dilemma arrived without fully declaring its gravitas.

Well, those of us inclined to regret are a big group. That bodes well for “If/Then,” which is likely to hit an especially sweet spot among urban women from about 25-45.

Equally ample is the fan club of the resurgent, complicated Menzel, who you might know as “Adele Dazeem” in her other life, and whose cool-to-the-touch character is so much at the core of the show that no one else can even get within several layers of it. Menzel, oft allowed to stand and belt on a near-empty stage (and who does not therein disappoint), is no sentimentalist. And aside, of course, from the force of her vocals — which make Kitt and Yorkey's pop-Broadway score, with its savvy lyrics, so exciting — that discernible lack of comfort with emotional revelation forges a woman who really does not know herself. And that is exactly what this show, which might easily have slipped into the bathetic, needs.

Granted, “If/Then” deals with what they call first world problems, given that most of the planet still makes its decisions out of necessity. And in the end, the show — which well knows on which side its commercial bread will be buttered and now is much easier to follow than early reports suggested — tells us that all tracks can lead to the same wiser-and-mostly-happy place, when in fact real life, dear reader, suggests a darker truth in which some consequential choices haunt you for life. But that's not what you pay the big Broadway bucks to hear.

“If/Then” is, for sure, overstuffed with huge crises in both storylines, and since we're double-timing here, they cascade at times in Yorkey's book with dizzying, credibility-sapping rapidity. The expositional needs are intense, but once it's clear that we're tracking Elizabeth's happiness, or lack thereof, and once Kitt and Yorkey provide her with a blistering number about bad choices that she can sing in her bathroom, the audience is in Menzel's and the show's pocket. And there they remain as Liz/Beth chooses between the soldier-doctor (played, with apt solidity, by James Snyder) who wooed her in the park, or an alternate life caught between a married guy who offers her jobs but wants more (Jerry Dixon) and an old college pal turned radical (Anthony Rapp) who may or may not be gay. Or bisexual. The travails of a mostly cheery lesbian couple, played amusingly by La Chanze and Jenn Colella, provide B-plot color, comic relief, move the plot along and offer a few cautionary tales of the broader community.